Back in Pakistan, Sharif Condemns Musharraf

JANE PERLEZ

Tuesday

Nov 27, 2007 at 4:23 AM

Nawaz Sharif, the religiously conservative former prime minister, demanded an end to emergency rule.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, Nov. 26 — As prime minister in the 1990s, Nawaz Sharif was a religiously conservative, nationalist leader who allowed the Taliban to flourish in Afghanistan and detonated a nuclear weapon despite an American plea not to.

Now Mr. Sharif is back in Pakistan after an eight-year absence, promoted by Saudi Arabia but seen by the Bush administration as a wild card who could complicate its support for the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

Pakistan’s top officials said Monday that General Musharraf would be sworn in as a civilian president in Islamabad on Thursday, which would be a belated, though significant, concession to both his political opposition here and supporters in the Bush administration who have demanded it as an important step toward restoring civilian rule.

But Mr. Sharif’s remarks at a news conference on Monday made clear that it may not be enough to appease the general’s opponents. Mr. Sharif, a former prime minister who was tossed out of power by General Musharraf in a 1999 coup, condemned his old nemesis for imposing emergency rule on Nov. 3. He said he would not serve as prime minister under a Musharraf presidency, demanded an end to the state of emergency and called for the reinstatement of fired Supreme Court justices.

Such a forceful stand contrasts in many respects to Mr. Sharif’s own time as prime minister. He is best remembered here and in Washington as the leader who brought the world a nuclear Pakistan, flirted with war with India and forged strong ties with religious conservatives. His tenure was marred by charges of rampant corruption and by confrontations with the courts and the media as well.

Mr. Sharif’s return to Pakistan now is likely to stir deep unease in the Bush administration, which has stood with General Musharraf as its best bet in the fight against terrorism, said Daniel Markey, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who until recently dealt with Pakistan issues at the State Department.

Nonetheless, Washington appears to have taken a back seat, or at least a stance of resignation at the inevitable, as the Saudis, perhaps Pakistan’s most revered ally, engineered the return of Mr. Sharif, Mr. Markey said.

Not least, Mr. Sharif’s return complicates the Bush administration’s support for Benazir Bhutto, another former prime minister and opposition leader, whom Washington has favored as a more secular politician, and a more certain partner against Islamic extremists.

Officials in Washington and London promoted her return from exile in October as a way to put a friendlier face on General Musharraf’s increasingly unpopular military regime.

While Ms. Bhutto and Mr. Sharif are known to detest the general, they detest each other as well. Whether they can form a cohesive opposition against General Musharraf before parliamentary elections set for Jan. 8 is far from clear.

While Mr. Sharif said he would not take part in the elections unless the emergency rule was lifted, he went ahead to meet the Monday deadline for filing nominating papers for the election.

Mr. Sharif is the son of a wealthy industrialist and a protégé of the military dictator Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq, a leader who also favored a conservative strain of Islam.

As prime minister twice — from 1990 to 1993 and from 1997 to 1999 — he is remembered by Pakistanis as the leader who decided to test Pakistan’s nuclear weapons in response to India’s nuclear tests in 1998. It was an immensely popular decision among Pakistanis, and ever since Mr. Sharif has been remembered as the leader who stood up to the world and showed off Pakistan’s nuclear prowess.

But that step won him little favor in Washington. President Clinton tried to persuade Mr. Sharif to hold back, appealing to his vanity with an offer of a state dinner at the White House and to his country’s pocket with billions of dollars in aid, according to Bruce Riedel, the member of the National Security Council who dealt with Pakistan at the time.

For some secular Pakistanis, Mr. Sharif’s return forebodes a strengthening of the religious right, which already has more seats in Parliament than when he was prime minister.

“For me this is a fight between Wahhabism and secular values,” said Fasih Ahmed, 30, a businessman from Mr. Sharif’s political base in Lahore, in a reference to the conservative strain of Islam favored by Saudi Arabia. “Nawaz is extremely close to the religious right.”

Mr. Sharif displayed his religious leanings during his second term when he tried to introduce Shariah, Islamic law, with a bill that gave the prime minister, and not the courts, the power to enforce religious edicts.

The legislation passed the lower house. But the bill ultimately failed in the Senate despite unusual visits by religious leaders, organized by Mr. Sharif’s political party, to the Senate chamber to press members for its passage.

As much as Mr. Sharif railed against General Musharraf on Monday for meddling with the Supreme Court, as prime minister, Mr. Sharif did so as well.

In his second term, Mr. Sharif opposed some of the appointees to the court made by the chief justice at the time, Sajjad Ali Shah. At one point a mob organized by his party, and including cabinet ministers, broke into the Supreme Court building in the capital, Islamabad.

They upended furniture and chased Mr. Shah out of the courtroom before being treated to afternoon tea by Mr. Sharif’s brother, Shahbaz Sharif, who was the chief minister of Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province.

“It still haunted us that our government stormed the Supreme Court, it was definitely a stigma,” said Khawaja Mohammed Asif, a member of Mr. Sharif’s cabinet at the time.

The Sharif government was not known as a friend of the news media, either.

In an effort to squelch a newspaper that was critical of Mr. Sharif, Najam Sethi, editor in chief of The Daily Times, was arrested in the middle of the night from his home in 1999 by government agents, gagged, held for almost a month, and threatened with charges of tax evasion and sedition. At the time, Mr. Sethi had written about Mr. Sharif’s “obsession with total power.”

For Washington, the pivotal encounter with Mr. Sharif came with the tense meeting between Mr. Sharif and President Clinton on July 4, 1999.

The episode involved the possibility of nuclear war over the escalation of the conflict between Pakistan and India in May 1999 in the contested area of Kashmir.

Pakistani-backed Kashmir militants and regular army units had advanced into an area known as Kargil, a remote part of the Himalayas. The forces had gained significant tactical control and were threatening India’s traditional positions.

There was “disturbing information about Pakistan preparing its nuclear arsenal for possible use,” wrote Mr. Riedel, the National Security Council official who was with Mr. Clinton at the talks, and wrote a published account afterward.

Mr. Sharif had appealed to Mr. Clinton for help and rushed to Washington on short notice, according to Mr. Riedel, because he was unsure of his standing with the army, which was led by General Musharraf, the man Mr. Sharif had picked for the job.

The prime minister himself was afraid that the army’s actions in Kashmir would start a war with India, said Mr. Riedel, who is now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

In Washington, Mr. Sharif was actually greeted at Dulles airport by the Saudi ambassador at the time, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, who was asked by President Clinton to weigh in with the prime minister, who appeared worried for his life, Mr. Riedel wrote.

But as the talks got under way, Mr. Sharif was initially unforthcoming with Mr. Clinton about how to solve the situation.

Mr. Clinton became angry, complaining that Pakistan had promised but failed to bring Osama bin Laden to justice from Afghanistan, Mr. Riedel recounted. Mr. Sharif had allowed Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan’s main intelligence agency, to work with the Taliban to foment terrorism, Mr. Clinton told him.

The president got specific about the nuclear threat: “Did Sharif order the Pakistani nuclear missile force to prepare for action? Did he realize how crazy that was?” Mr. Clinton effectively asked, according to Mr. Riedel. “You’ve put me in the middle today, set the U.S. up to fail and I won’t let it happen. Pakistan is messing with nuclear war.”

Mr. Sharif denied that he had ordered the preparation of the nuclear weapons, Mr. Riedel said.

By the end of the discussions, Mr. Sharif agreed to order his army to pull back its men and its allies and “to do the right thing for Pakistan and the world,” Mr. Riedel said. But, “he was not sure his army would see it that way.”

Three months later, it was clear the army did not agree, and Mr. Sharif was out of his job.

In October, Mr. Sharif tried to move against General Musharraf by denying the general’s plane permission to land in Pakistan on its return from a trip to Sri Lanka. The military rebelled and opened the airport in Karachi, and General Musharraf had Mr. Sharif arrested and put in jail.

In a footnote to the saga, Mr. Riedel recounts that Mr. Clinton urged General Musharraf not to execute Mr. Sharif as General Zia had executed Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, father of Benazir Bhutto, in 1979.

“With our encouragement, the Saudis pressed hard for Sharif’s freedom,” Mr. Riedel said, and finally in December 2000 he was sent into exile to the kingdom, from where he has now returned.

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